Recently, in the field of radiographic techniques of taking radiographic images such as CT images and medical X-ray moving images, slight differences between a plurality of diagnosis target images such as multislice CT images have become important for diagnosis. Such images are displayed on a monitor to perform diagnosis.
A display method called a cine mode is available as a conventional technique in a medical image display method which handles many images as process targets, e.g., CT images and medical X-ray moving images. This method is a technique of dynamically switching a plurality of images to display an image, and is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 8-166995.
There has also been available a technique of performing diagnosis by switching a currently displayed image to preceding and succeeding images within the same area by mouse and keyboard operations.
A RaySum display method or the like (e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-014030) is also available, in which the image obtained by multiple time averaging of a plurality of images is displayed in order to reduce noise in each image and reduce the number of diagnosis images.
The above display method based on the cine mode is designed to only unitarily display by switching tomographic cross sections and consecutive images in slice order. In order to find slight differences between images, it is necessary to perform subtle comparison between the images. That is, the simple cine mode is designed to only sequentially switch image to display an image, and hence cannot perform subtle comparison between the images.
In the RaySum display method, the details of a plurality of slices are lost.
Switching with mouse and keyboard operations requires manual operation. That is, cumbersome operation is required.